The Sharp Contours of Youth: Greta Gerwig Stars in Frances Ha

“I love you, Sophie, even if you love your phone that has e-mail more than me. Tell me the story of us.”

“Again? Okay. Frances, we are going to take over the world.”

Frances (Greta Gerwig), the heroine of Noah Baumbach’s newest movie, shares a Brooklyn apartment with her best friend, Sophie (a great Mickey Sumner), and together they chase nebulous dreams through the comfort of obscurity and youth. Frances is a dancer by intent but not by profession: She’s dragged through the shoals of a company apprenticeship by an aging teacher (Charlotte d’Amboise) who thinks she is an overeager, undermotivated mess. (She is.) Sophie works, as many young New Yorkers do, at Random House. They’re devoted to each other, but not quite as much as Frances thinks: When an opportunity arises for Sophie to move out, she takes it, leaving Frances to fend for herself. Struggling to find her way, she moves in with two guys she scarcely knows: Lev (Girls’Adam Driver, delivering the most entertaining performance in the film), a sometime sculptor and geeky-smooth lothario, and Benji (Michael Zegen), an aspiring screenwriter who considers both himself and Frances perennially “undateable.” She agrees, but this seems, possibly, the least of her life challenges.

Slowly at first, and then more dizzyingly, Frances’s life and dancing dreams begin to come apart. She leaves the guys’ apartment when she can no longer pay rent and hangs out with her family in Sacramento. She crashes with a fellow dancer (Grace Gummer) who can’t stand her. She goes to Paris but does nothing there; she returns to Vassar, where she went to college, to work as a camp counselor and earn student wages as the caterer from hell. (When told to keep an eye on an important guest, she hovers over one shoulder and prods her with obnoxious questions.) And she does all of this in a spirit of twee oblivion, aware of her out-of-step-ness in the way an ostrich might acknowledge its difficulty getting off the ground. Frances is meant to be seen as an original, a charming weirdo, a character who can never really change and shouldn’t, because, after all, the best thing about her is the sheer uniqueness of her vision.

Is that vision worthy of a movie? Frances Ha has already been likened to Annie Hall, but the comparison is misleading. Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall was an avatar of wishful post-sixties reinvention, while Frances—awkward, quixotic, insular—is a character so stubbornly intransigent, so resistant to the normal forces of socialization, that her progress through the movie happens mostly through logistics: a new bedroom, a fresh job. Gerwig, who cowrote the script with Baumbach, is extraordinarily adept at bringing this unbrushed and gawkily dressed woman to life. Baumbach, best known for The Squid and the Whale, is equally skilled at rejoicing in the character’s eccentricity. As a writer-director, he’s come to be known as a master of the comic downer, turning colorful letdowns into a subject for the screen. So it’s not entirely to dismiss the latest movie to report that Frances Ha is itself a colorful letdown—a stab at freewheeling naturalism and true-to-life imperfection that’s stifled by its own intentions.

Partly, this is a function of the movie’s self-conscious craft—and the absence of it. Frances Ha hangs loosely around Frances and Sophie’s changing relationship: Sophie gets engaged and goes abroad, so Frances must learn to take on the world alone. But the film eschews traditional narration. Episodic scenes run back-to-back, with few transitions; characters vanish and reappear; dialogue mimics the vernacular of modern life (“Patch is the kind of guy who buys a black leather couch and is like, ‘I love it’ ”) and coastal culture (“This apartment is very . . . aware of itself”). Many movies have successfully gone all-in with such organic textures. But Frances Ha doesn’t. Instead, Baumbach adopts a polished black-and-white aesthetic and a fastidious attention to detail. (One scene reportedly went through 42 takes.)

As a result, Frances Ha feels more like a convergence of blind spots—the naturalistic mixed with the polished and stylized—than the sum of strengths. One can’t help but wonder whether the Baumbach-Gerwig partnership (they’re a romantic couple, too) is creatively handicapped by love, age difference, or something else. Ill-paced scenes and many limp jokes suggest that Baumbach may have deferred too generously to Gerwig’s voice-of-youth vernacular; the film would have benefitted from a sharp backstop editor in Gerwig’s demographic to sift the gold out of this slurry. The director’s fussy New Wave–esque stylings, meanwhile, could have used a reality check of their own, and a loosening up: Frances Ha may aspire to the whimsy of Godard and Rivette, but it lacks their freshness and caprice. As it is, the film drifts tediously between two visions: a portrait of freewheeling youth as imagined by a middle-aged man. To dignify the hapless struggles of the twentysomething years on-screen is a worthy goal. But it deserves a defter treatment, and sharper approach, than Frances Ha provides.